He sat across the table from me, grinning like an interlocutor. His smile was like a row of teeth between his fleshy lips. His fingers, steepled into a upwards triangle of fingers that resembled nothing so much as some steepled fingers, jutted into the air between us like some jutting fingers.

‘So,’ he said, his voice as low and calm as a low, calm voice, ‘do we have a deal?’

‘Um...’ I said, hesitating like a hesitant person. ‘I can’t really...’ The truth was, I was terrified. My stomach was turning over like the stomach of someone who is very nervous about a deal they are making which they aren’t sure they should be making and that uncertainty is causing them to feel a bit sick.

Graham Greene said once that a good simile should work in reverse (that is, X is like Y and Y is like X should sound equally good), and by that standard, these are perfect!There is a collection of similes sent in to the Washington Post by readers (often erroneously cited as actual high school essay similes), some of which I treasure to the point of knowing them by heart: "Her eyes were like big brown circles with a smaller black circle in their centers", for example, and "The whole scene had an eerie quality about it, like when you're in a different city and Jeopardy comes on at 7.30 instead of 7".